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Neat's line of products are really designed more for business use, so it's set up to recognize receipts and tax documents. It's not intended for recipes, and I wouldn't recommend anyone spend $400 just to scan some recipe cards, but if you already have NeatDesk or were considering buying it for a small business, you can leverage it for recipes; it'll be a pseudo-hack job.

All the scanned recipes automatically sorted into a folder I set up called Baking, nested within another folder for Recipes. I waited until I got through the stack to trouble shoot the few recipes that were mistakenly categorized as receipts (although I later learned that I could have set the default item type to "document" and not had this problem at all).

Folders and organization. The ability to organize into folders and subfolders with NeatDesk is similar to Evernote. You have good control.

Editing. Basic editing tools are included for fixing up the scanned items, which is something you don't see in Evernote. I could rotate files that I had to scan sideways due to the page size, as well as brighten the images and increase or decrease the contrast.

For the text, however, you can only add notes to a notes field. You can't actually type a new document in Neat the way you can with Evernote.

Images. If you use Neat, you can install the mobile app for NeatCloud and take photos of cookbook pages that you want to upload, so you don't have to rip them out of the book and scan them.

Email. Just as with Evernote, all NeatDesk users get a @neatcloud.com address, and anything sent there automatically imports into your default folder.

Sharing? As I mentioned, using the Neat software to store your recipes is a bit of a hack job, so sharing features aren't included. You could export batches of files and email them to friends, but you won't find tools for collaborating and sharing natively.

Other Places to Keep Recipes

Pinterest. I've tried using Pinterest for saving recipes, but it doesn't suit my personality (though I adore Pinterest for home décor, which I'll cover in a future article).

If you're visually oriented and enjoy sharing recipes with friends, I highly recommend creating a free Pinterest account and making a few boards for recipes. Pinterest is kind of like a virtual cork board or scrap book. You can't tag or sort your recipes, which feels too disorganized for me, but you can group recipes onto boards that are as vague ("Recipes") or as specific ("Asian lunch ideas")_as you want them to be. Anything you pin to a board is stuck in place, meaning you can't shuffle the order of pins or even so much as alphabetize.

You could always use Pinterest for those times when you want casual, visual browsing, and then push to Evernote any recipe that you want to keep in a more organized fashion.

Cooking websites. Plenty of cooking and food websites let you create an account to save recipes. That's fine, but you're often limited to what's in their network. If you do use an account on a cooking site to bookmark recipes, remember you can always clip them to Evernote with the Web Clipper.

Recipe apps. I've tried a number of special apps for saving recipes and have run into the same problems that I found in cooking websites. Special features you often will find in these apps and sites that you can't get from Evernote include the ability to generate a shopping list based on recipes you tick, as well as the ability to add recipes to a meal-planning calendar. If those two specific features float your boat, try Pepperplate.

Get Organized and Get Cooking Organizing your recipes could be a very large project, depending on the number of recipes you have to digitize as well as their format. The payoff, though, isn't just improved organization for your own use. A well-organized digital recipe collection makes it easier to share them … or lock them up using a password if you'd rather take those secret family recipes to the grave.

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, based in Washington, D.C., specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as apps and gadgets for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats.
She also spoke at TED@250, a salon-style conference at TED.com headquarters, about how to better and more sanely manage email.
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